Riddle: When is a Subway not a Subway? Answer: When It's a Flood Detention Pool

     What excuse can a politician use for lack of preparedness leading to some of the worst flooding in the nation's history, causing massive disruption for months at a cost of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars?  What if that politician had twelve years to come up with a good excuse?

   Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou—better known as "Mr. Ma" (or the wizard of orz) when lower level Chinese bureaucrats come to town—faced that challenge recently when he was scolding southern Taiwan political leaders for their lack of flood preparedness.   

     The leaders he was scolding were members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and Mr. Ma doubles as chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT.)  The DPP leaders used the excuse that the central government, ineptly headed by Ma, tended to dole out more dollars to counties and municipalities headed by KMT politicians than those headed by DPP politicians.

     Then one of the local leaders, in rejecting Ma's scolding, reminded Ma of the Typhoon Nari debacle in 2001 when Ma Ying-jeou was mayor of Taipei.  The Marx Brothers couldn't have come up with a wilder farce than the Typhoon Nari flooding.

     The pumps used to keep the subway from flooding had been peculiarly designed.  They were equipped with vibration sensors that automatically shut down the pumps if excessive vibration was detected.  As it turned out, the excessive vibration came, not from the subway structure, but from the pumps themselves.  In short, the system was designed to sacrifice a multibillion-dollar subway system to protect a few pumps worth no more than a few thousand dollars.

     When the southern Taiwan leaders challenged him for an explanation, President Ma offered the excuse that the flooding along Xing-yi Road and elsewhere in Taipei would have been much worse if the subway system had not flooded.  The subway system, Ma said with a straight face that Buster Keaton would have envied, acted as a "flood detention pool" to limit above-ground flooding in other parts of the city.

     Ma quickly resumed scolding the southern Taiwan leaders, suggesting that they, too, should spend their tax dollars on flood detention pools.  He didn't say whether the flood detention pools should be built in the form of multibillion-dollar subway systems.

     A Ma administration official suggested that the local officials would have more money for municipal flood control measures if they didn't waste tax dollars on "more visible things" such as landslide prevention.  (Editorial comment: Who needs mountain villages anyway?  Or mountain villagers, for that matter?)

     The next time you're tempted to take the subway, make sure you check the weather report.  A subway is more than just a subway; it's a flood detention pool.